Spoken word has provided a rich seam within David Sylvian’s work over the last decade or so. He has vocalised the writing of some fascinating authors, from the poems of Arseny Tarkovsky for Ryuichi Sakamoto’s performance at the Concert for Japan and ‘Life, Life’ featured on his master-work async, to an extract from In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès for a collaboration with Mark Wastell and Rhodri Davies released as There is No Love; from the descriptions of a myriad of lesser gods by Paal-Helge Haugen on Uncommon Deities, to Japanese haiku and death poems written by Buddhist priests for the Twinkle³ album Upon this Fleeting Dream. Indeed, at the time of writing this article Sylvian has just added to the canon by reciting Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘I Measure Every Grief I Meet’ for a collaboration with Icelandic cellist and film-score composer Hildur Guðnadóttir (link in footnotes).
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‘a supernova on a petal’
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